One night, as Devavrata sat beneath a moonless sky—barefoot, still dusted in ash from the evening's mantras—Parashurama emerged from the shadowed cliffside like a phantom of ancient resolve. He stood beside his disciple in silence, arms crossed, his face worn like a weathered blade: blunt, indestructible, and sharp only when needed.
For a time, he said nothing.
The wind murmured through the pine-trees below.
Somewhere far off, a jackal cried into the void.
Then, quietly—without ceremony—he spoke.
"You were never meant to ascend like others," the sage said, his voice neither praise nor judgment. "You carried astras before your soul had anchored. You bore judgment before your mind had questions. No ordinary path could hold you—and so, it broke."
Devavrata's breath caught in his chest like a misdrawn blade.
"You mean… I failed?"
Parashurama shook his head. Not with dismissal, but with the slow grace of one who had once asked that question himself under darker moons.
"You were not broken," he said. "You were re-tempered. Iron bends before it becomes steel. Soul must unravel before it dares the void."
He stepped forward and knelt, fingers rough with callus and time, and drew a single circle in the dust with his thumb. No words. Just the curve—unbroken, eternal.
"Your cultivation path," he said at last, "was devoured by the Bhargavastra."
Devavrata's eyes narrowed. He could still feel it, sealed deep within—like a sun wrapped in thorns, coiled at the base of his soul.
"That weapon," Parashurama continued, "is not just fire—it is karma incarnate. It consumed your progression, not as punishment, but as payment. It severed you from linear growth."
"You will not pass through Late Soul Transformation. That gate has closed to you."
Devavrata's voice was barely a whisper.
"Then what lies beyond?"
Parashurama looked at him—not as a master looks at a student, but as a witness looks at prophecy.
His voice dropped to a hush.
" TheVoid."
Devavrata stared into the circle in the dirt.
It was just a shape—a line bent into completion.
And yet it held something more than form.
It seemed simple. Empty.
A child's symbol, a sage's teaching, a battlefield scar.
But as he gazed, something in it rippled.
Not with motion—but with absence.
As if the very fabric of reality paused around its curve,
as if the world had forgotten to breathe within its bounds.
A silence took hold.
"Void Ascension," Parashurama said again.
"A realm few reach. Fewer return from."
He rose, slow and deliberate, the dust of centuries falling from his robe like falling ash from some long-dead fire. The wind shifted, and for a heartbeat, the night seemed to lean closer.
"It is the art of un-becoming," he said.
"Where qi is no longer drawn—but dissolved.
Where cause and effect lose meaning.
Where time no longer walks in a line,
but folds like a prayer into the soul's hands."
Devavrata lifted his eyes.
The sky, once distant and cold, now shimmered with terrible intimacy.
Stars burned like eyes behind veils.
Galaxies spun like sacred yantras etched into cosmic silk.
Each constellation hummed with the echo of forgotten names.
Were they always this bright?
Or had he simply never looked without searching?
He was no longer seeing the heavens as a seeker.
He was seeing them as a mirror.
And for the first time, he understood—he had been looking outward his whole life, hoping to conquer, to master, to ascend.
But now… now, everything pointed inward.
Parashurama placed a hand on his shoulder.
It was not warm.
It was not cold.
It simply was—like mountain stone, like time before time.
And though he said nothing more, something flickered behind his eyes—
a sorrow not loud enough to name,
and an anticipation too dangerous to speak aloud.
He had stood here once, long ago—
and stepped back.
Devavrata would not.
"You are close," he said. "But this is not a gate I can open.
You must vanish to enter.
Not with body—
But with identity."
Devavrata's heart beat once, loud as a drum in the silence of the hills.
Vanish?
What was left, if he let go of name, bloodline, vow, even self?
He opened his mouth, but no words came.
There was nothing to ask.
Only to surrender.
Parashurama took a step back, his expression unreadable—neither pride nor sadness, only the gravity of someone who had stood at this threshold before and chosen differently.
And then he turned.
He walked into the rising mist.
No sound marked his steps. No footprints followed.
He faded as if into a breath, as though he had only ever been a memory—
a weapon forged by the gods
to pass along fire
before it extinguished itself.
He had once stood at this threshold. He had chosen battle. Devavrata… had chosen silence.
And Devavrata remained.
Alone.
But not empty.
He looked once more at the circle in the dirt.
Then he closed his eyes.
The wind shifted.
The stars turned.
And the breath between eternities began to deepen within him
That night, Devavrata sat in stillness.
No mantras.
No scrolls.
No movement.
Only breath.
He inhaled—deep and slow.
And for the first time in years, he exhaled without expectation.
Not to gather qi. Not to refine his essence.
Not even to empty his mind.
Just… to breathe.
The wind did not stir.
The stars did not pulse.
The cave around him did not groan with divine pressure.
But something inside him—
A tension buried across lifetimes, a knot tied in the soul's deepest thread—
released.
He felt no surge of power.
No rupture of light.
Only a single, silent descent.
Like a stone dropped into an unseen ocean.
And beneath that ocean, where light had never reached,
the soul unfurled.
At his lowest, he had become nothing.
No qi stirred. No technique answered.
For a time, he had lost everything—cultivation, strength, even the breath of spirit itself.
A mortal in all but name.
And now—from that void—he had crossed.
Not from the threshold of power, but from its ashes.
From mid Soul Transformation, through desolation itself—
Into Void Ascension.
Void Ascension
It came without trumpet or roar.
No golden clouds. No spectral dragons.
No astras igniting the sky.
The moment passed unnoticed by the world—
But within him, the veil tore.
There was no sound.
Only emptiness.
Not a void of despair—but a canvas beyond form.
An absence so complete… it became the truth.
His qi no longer flowed.
It simply was.
No longer energy in motion,
but being itself.
Not fire.
Not frost.
But the space between both—
The pause between inhale and exhale.
The silence between heartbeat and heartbeat.
And he was there.
He felt time...
...slip.
It folded in on itself like silk.
He was no longer bound by the arrow of causality.
He saw his birth—Ganga's tears falling into the river with his first cry.
He saw his death—an arrow glistening with a vow kept too long.
He saw now, stretched infinitely between those points, like a golden thread spun by fate itself.
He heard the dying whispers of forgotten kings.
The laughter of children not yet conceived.
The weeping of widows from battles he had yet to fight.
The chant of a thousand monks from mountaintops never mapped.
He was not a man.
Not a prince.
Not even a warrior.
He was a Witness.
His soul—unmoored from form—
floated in a place where breath was the universe and silence was its scripture.
And in that stillness…
He touched everything.
A tree blooming in a desert three kingdoms away.
A comet arcing over a battlefield drenched in prophecy.
A girl on the streets of Hastinapura humming an old lullaby.
The echo of Ganga, whispering a mother's love from a realm beyond the stars.
He understood now.
Power did not come from domination.
Nor from pain.
Nor even from sacrifice.
Power came from release.
From surrendering identity so utterly that one could hold the world—not in fists,
but in open hands.
And in that instant, the final boundary dissolved
He stepped beyond the Soul Transformation realm.
There was no late stage.
No incremental rise.
He leapt.
From mid Soul Transformation—
Into Void Ascension.
Where qi became silence.
Where form became intent.
Where the soul learned not just to endure eternity—
but to become one breath within it.
And the astras—once screaming for purpose—fell quiet. Not defeated. Not gone. But listening.